It should be noted on the front end that taking a person who is currently confined to a wheelchair and must blow or suck into a straw to gain even limited mobility and allowing them to stand up and walk normally at eye level with their peers, care for their own personal needs and function independently with comfortable and inexpensive prosthetics that are concealed by normal clothing is a daunting task. Attesting to just how difficult to impossible that task has been to this point are the facts that:    1. The current design of a wheelchair, except for the addition of power, is not much improved in functionally over the original invented by Eric Von Bulenheimer in 1672.    2. Perhaps the greatest advancement since then has been a chair on wheels that can climb stairs but must be navigated backwards, doesn't work on many staircases including but not limited to spiral staircases and short depth staircases, depends on the traction of its wheels even on slippery stairs for stability, requires some strength to manage the handrail and is still a heavy (202 pounds) wheelchair that must be accommodated (lugged) everywhere the user goes including airplanes, cars, escalators, bathrooms, etc.    3. In the United States alone we spend billions every year to accommodate just wheelchair supported handicaps.    4. Millions of people who want to work are not able to even care for themselves with that additional cost measured not only in human tragedy but in the loss of the productivity of good and willing minds.    5. This patent disclosure, in order to overcome the seeming endless spectrum of technical and human problems that have prevented the provision of a real solution, requires well over 100 pages just to recite on paper the uncommon number of new technologies and processes required to work together to effectively solve the inherent problems.
Thousands of people struggle with crutches and wheelchairs and uncomfortable prosthetics all their life. There are new wheel-based chair solutions that include balancing features but stairs, which have always been impossible, though climbable while balanced on wheels, can be very dangerous if the user is bumped or encounters a slippery or faulty surface and it's neither a smooth ride or an impressive entrance. Also, some paraplegics can only crudely control a powered wheelchair by awkwardly blowing into a straw and then only under almost ideal, smooth terrain circumstances and within a very limited scope of activities. For many, hands and feet, etc. are useless making them helpless dependents on others.
Many forms of prostheses have been attempted to aid in the direction of assistive equipment and for full replacement of lost limbs (both walking related and others) with some success. However rejection rates are high due to difficulty of use, long training periods, expense of professional support, burdens on parents, overhead of maintenance, lack of delicacy due to the absence of tactile response, tight prostheses, uncomfortable fits, raw friction areas on the patient's skin, itching, hot spots and poor circulation. Many can't afford a good prosthesis because the concept of standard parts with its incumbent economies of scale and ability to serve a broad market has not completely reached the prosthetics world due to the lack of success in developing a “one size fits many” prosthesis. It is normative for even minor prosthetics to be custom designed and custom fitted and then must be adjusted over time particularly in children.
Further, research and development has been limited by inadequate simulation and modeling facilities that require tedious setup unique to each test patient as well as inefficient and awkward means to communicate complex human motions to a virtual body and to communicate/recreate virtual body motions in a human body.
The current invention overcomes all of these shortcomings.